In 2021, I wrote that Joomla was still faster than WordPress. I had the numbers to back it up, and the post did well. Plenty of people agreed with me, and a few didn’t.
Five years on, I build most of my sites in WordPress. That might sound like a U-turn, and in a way it is. But when I went back to that original test, I realised it hadn’t really been comparing Joomla with WordPress at all. It had been comparing Joomla with WordPress running a heavy page builder. That’s a very different thing.
What I found in 2021
The test was simple. A client had a Joomla site I’d built on a JoomShaper template. It was an early version, closer to an advanced template with some page-building features than the full page builder JoomShaper offers today. I rebuilt the site in WordPress using Elementor Pro, which had the design freedom to recreate the JoomShaper layout almost exactly. Same content, same design, same server, so it was about as fair a comparison as a real project allows.
Joomla won comfortably. The homepage HTML came in at around 37KB, against 106KB for WordPress. And the Joomla page reached its first meaningful paint in about 1.2 seconds, compared with 2.4 seconds for WordPress. Half the time.
At the time, I put that down to the platforms themselves. Joomla felt lean and tightly built. WordPress, which started life as blogging software, often felt as though it had been bolted together one plugin at a time.
What I didn’t give enough weight to was how much the tools themselves were adding. Elementor Pro was my go-to page builder at the time, and that design freedom came at a cost. Page builders like that make building pages easier by adding a lot of code along the way, from extra layers of HTML to stylesheets and scripts that load whether a page needs them or not.
To be fair to Elementor, it has made performance improvements since then, so this isn’t a verdict on how it performs today. But looking back, I think that extra weight explains most of the gap I measured.
So my test proved something real. It just wasn’t quite what I thought it proved.
What changed
Quite a lot, as it turns out. But the biggest change wasn’t WordPress itself. It was the tools used to build WordPress sites.
Leaner page builders
For me, the turning point was Bricks Builder. Where my 2021 page builder added layers of extra code to every page, Bricks produces clean, minimal code and only loads what each page actually uses.
It also lets me build sites in a way that’s much closer to hand coding. Reusable classes and CSS variables keep styles consistent and compact across the whole site. Fluid typography scales text smoothly from phone to desktop without piles of extra CSS. And fonts are stored on the site itself rather than loaded from Google, which removes a request to another server and helps with privacy too.
For sites that rarely change, tools like Bricks Static and Simply Static can even turn a WordPress site into plain HTML files, which is about as fast as a website gets, though it makes regular updates more awkward.
Better ways to measure speed
The way speed is measured has moved on too. “First meaningful paint”, the figure I used in 2021, has been replaced by Google’s Core Web Vitals. These measure how quickly the main content appears (Largest Contentful Paint), how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks, and how much the layout jumps around while it loads. They’re a much better reflection of how a page actually feels to use, and they feed into Google’s rankings.
Joomla has moved on too
To be fair, Joomla hasn’t stood still. It’s been through several major versions since 2021, with a modernised admin area and templates, and it’s still actively developed. But its share of the web has fallen to around 1% of all websites. That means fewer developers, fewer extensions and fewer tools built around it.
So where does that leave the comparison?
Where things stand now
I haven’t rerun the test, and I’m not going to pretend I have. Building truly identical sites on different platforms is much harder than it sounds, and the results would only ever tell part of the story.
But since switching to Bricks, the difference is obvious in my day-to-day work. The sites I build now are lighter, they load quickly on a phone, and good PageSpeed scores are the norm rather than something to fight for at the end of a project.
That’s the same tidy, efficient quality that made Joomla feel so quick in 2021. It turns out WordPress was always capable of it. It just needed the right tools.
That’s not to say every WordPress site is fast now. In my experience, the slowest are usually built on pre-built themes from marketplaces like ThemeForest. Many come with their own sliders, effects, bundled plugins and even their own page builders, and load most of it even a page uses it or not. Add a long list of extra plugins and a WordPress site can still be every bit as slow as it was in 2021.
The difference is that it’s now a choice, not a given.
Why I build in Bricks now
Speed is what first caught my attention, but it’s not the only reason I’ve stuck with Bricks.
After years of working with Elementor Pro, Bricks was a breath of fresh air. Its interface feels much closer to Webflow than to a typical WordPress page builder. I work with proper structure, classes and variables, the way a designer who understands HTML and CSS would want to, rather than fighting a set of preset widgets.
That means I can design every site around the client, rather than adapting a theme that was built for someone else. And because I control the structure, the code underneath stays as tidy as the design on top.
For clients, the result is simple: a site that’s fast, looks the way it was designed to, and is still easy for them to update once it’s live.
Fewer plugins, with a little help from AI
One of WordPress’s strengths is that there’s a plugin for almost everything. One of its weaknesses is that every plugin adds weight, and many load their own files on every page, needed or not.
AI has changed that balance. For small, specific jobs, such as a custom field on a form, a tweak to how content is displayed, or a small admin shortcut, I can now write a short, tailored PHP snippet with AI’s help instead of installing another plugin. The same is possible on Joomla. But WordPress’s huge developer community means there’s far more existing code and documentation for AI to draw on, and I find that shows in the results.
The important part is that every snippet is reviewed and tested before it goes anywhere near a live site. AI is a fast assistant, not a replacement for knowing what the code does.
Is Joomla still worth it?
For the right project, yes. Joomla is still actively developed, and its built-in user permissions, access levels and multilingual support make it a strong choice for large, content-heavy websites with lots of users. Think institutions, membership organisations and large publishers.
For small businesses, it’s a harder case to make. Design options are more restrictive, newer web technologies tend to arrive in the WordPress world first, and WordPress’s ecosystem means that when you need something that does one specific job, there’s almost always a well-supported plugin for it.
If you already have a Joomla site that works well, there’s no need to rebuild it just for speed. But if you’re starting a new small business website today, WordPress with a well-chosen builder is what I’d recommend, and it’s what I use myself.
The bigger lesson
If five years have taught me anything, it’s that the platform AND how the site is built that matters.
Joomla, WordPress and most other modern platforms can all produce fast websites. They can all produce slow ones too. The difference is the care that goes into the build: what’s loaded, what’s left out, and whether each page is built to do its job well, rather than to show off features nobody asked for.
So if you’re comparing platforms for a new website, by all means ask which one is fastest. But it’s more useful to ask how your site will be built, and who’s building it.
There is a twist, though. Just as WordPress has caught up on speed, AI is changing the security picture for this platform. The same tools that help me write a tidy PHP snippet can also help someone find a weakness in a poorly maintained plugin. More on that, and on what the next generation of platforms might look like, in my next post.
If you’re planning a new website, or wondering why your current one feels slow, get in touch. I’m always happy to talk it through. And if you’d like to know more about WordPress itself, there’s more on my What is WordPress? page.